Year 2008 {Baby Book & Journal Filler}

Welcome to the year 2008!

Below you will find the list I compiled of major events, trends, world leaders, cost of living, and popular culture for the year 2008. I hope this helps you with the baby book or commemorative project you’re working on. If you don’t want to write down all this information, take a look at the printable versions.

Affiliate links have been incorporated into this post to provide you with further information about trends and popular items during this period of time.

2008 Top Movies:

2008 Top Books:

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
The Thief at the End of the World by Joe Jackson
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Lush Life by Richard Price
Anathem by Neal Stephenson

2008 Major Events:

-Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States in an historic victory that brought the United States its first African-American President. In an equally historic democratic primary, Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination after a 50-state caucus. On the right, Alaska governor Sarah Palin energized the ticket headed by John McCain in the Republican nomination. The long and hard-fought election also showed a marked generational shift in American Politics with the Internet, mobile phones and social networking being used to rally support for candidates.
-February 6 – A tornado outbreak, the deadliest in 23 years, kills 58 in the Southern United States.
-The term “Made in China” brought about a great deal of fear in the minds of consumers as the chemical melamine was found in food products given to animals and humans and high levels of lead in children’s toys brought about new consumer safety standards
-Fidel Castro announces his resignation as President of Cuba, effective February 24.
-Near financial collapse, the US Government came to the aid of some of the historically most financially solvent institutions. Because of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, many banks found themselves out of cash. Those that weren’t gobbled up by their former competitors, were left floundering. Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, but Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG were helped out by taxpayers. By the end of the year, consumer spending was at record declines, home values continued to plummet and joblessness on the rise.
-August 17 – Michael Phelps surpasses Mark Spitz in Gold Medals won at a single Olympics, winning eight.
-October 3 – Global financial crisis: U.S. President George W. Bush signs the revised Emergency Economic Stabilization Act into law, creating a 700 billion dollar Treasury fund to purchase failing bank assets.
-December 11 – Bernard Madoff is arrested by U.S. federal authorities on charges of running a massive decades-long Ponzi scheme swindling thousands of investors – the largest financial fraud in history.
-December 18 – The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicts Théoneste Bagosora and two other senior Rwandan army officers of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentences them to life imprisonment.

2008 Pop Culture:

-Madonna and Guy Ritchie divorce after 8 years of marriage.
-Britney Spears has a mental breakdown and her family intervenes by committing her to a psychiatric ward.
-In January Heath Ledger, 28 died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
-Miley Cyrus poses topless, but covered with a sheet, for Vanity Fair magazine creating negative publicity for the 15-year-old.
-Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt welcome twins, Vivienne Marcheline and Knox Leon in July.

2008 Technology and Science:

Hyper connectivity~ all devices connected to internet; phone, computer, tv, camera, Ereader, etc.
Twitter
Smart phones
GPS gadgets and locators
Macbook
Ebooks
Amazon Kindle
Mobile apps
Tweetdeck
Facebook
……………………..
March 9 – The first European Space Agency Automated Transfer Vehicle, a cargo spacecraft for the International Space Station, launches from Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.
April 22 – Surgeons at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital perform the first operations using bionic eyes, implanting them into 2 blind patients.
May 25 – NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft becomes the first to land on the northern polar region of Mars, and then uncovers ice with lander’s robotic arm.
-In 2008, several research groups figured out what was going wrong and solved this problem–>In 2007, scientists learned how to reprogram skin cells into stem cells, without cloning or destroying embryos. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. The tissues grown from those cells had a nasty tendency to become cancerous, which made them useless for regenerative medicine — the science of building and fixing body parts. Researchers had used an an adenovirus to slip four genes into each cell, but the microbe was causing lots of collateral damage. By switching to a different kind of virus, scientists at The Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital were able to make the procedure safe.
-Turning water into fuel. Daniel Nocera of MIT used electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, store it in separate tanks, then recombined the gases in a fuel cell for power.